Kevin Boyle | |
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| Born | Kevin Boyle October 7, 1960 Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Detroit Mercy University of Michigan |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, Professor of History |
| Spouse | Victoria Getis |
| Children | Abby and Nan Boyle |
Kevin Boyle (born October 7, 1960) is an American author and the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. His 2004 book, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, won the National Book Award. [1]
Boyle was born in Detroit, Michigan, and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Detroit, now University of Detroit Mercy in 1982. In 1990, he received his doctorate from the University of Michigan, where he was mentored by Sidney Fine, biographer of Frank Murphy. [2]
Boyle's first academic job was as assistant professor of history at the University of Toledo. In 1994, Boyle was appointed an assistant professor in the history department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After promotion to associate professor, he served as director of the UMass Amherst graduate program in history in 1999.
Boyle was appointed a Fulbright scholar in 1997, and spent the school year as Mary Ball Washington Professor at University College Dublin where he taught the history of the American civil rights movement.
Boyle's research covers 20th century American history. He studies the intersection of class, race, and politics.[ citation needed ]
Boyle has written on politics and the American labor movement. His most notable work in this regard is his 1995 book, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968.[ citation needed ]
Boyle has written more extensively on racial issues in the United States. In 2004, his Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age won the National Book Award for non-fiction. [1] The book subsequently won a host of other honors, including being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The work also was named a New York Times notable book for 2004 and a State of Michigan notable book for 2005.[ citation needed ]
In 2021, Boyle released the book The Shattering: America in the 1960s, a historical account of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, told through the lens of differing historical figures (both major figures and lesser known individuals) as well as everyday Americans. [3] [ better source needed ]
Boyle is currently working on a new book, The Splendid Dead: An American Ordeal, which centers around the story of the infamous anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti. It is to be published by Houghton Mifflin. For a preview of this project see Un Povero Uomo: An Immigrant's Odyssey in America which documents Bartolomeo Vanzetti's immigration story.[ citation needed ]
Boyle's book, Arc of Justice, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction [1] and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.[ citation needed ]
Boyle has also won a number of honors and fellowships. He has twice been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, in 1996 and 2001, as well as a Fulbright scholar (1997), a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (2001) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.[ citation needed ]
Boyle was invited to be an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer for 2006-2007.[ citation needed ]
Boyle sits on the advisory board for the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University. He also is a member of the editorial board for Labor History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History.[ citation needed ]
Boyle is also a member of the Society of American Historians and the PEN American Center.[ citation needed ]
Boyle was honored by the Detroit City Council for The Sweet Trials, a play based on Arc of Justice. [4] [ better source needed ]
Since 2004, Boyle has been a member of the elite Spinach Book Club, where he is recognized as a valuable member. [ citation needed ]
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer who became famous in the 19th century for high profile representations of trade union causes, and in the 20th century for several criminal matters, including the Leopold and Loeb murder trial, the Scopes "monkey" trial, and the Ossian Sweet defense. He was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform. Darrow was also well known as a public speaker, debater, and writer.
Walter Philip Reuther was an American leader of organized labor and civil rights activist who built the United Automobile Workers (UAW) into one of the most progressive labor unions in American history. He considered labor movements not as narrow special interest groups but as instruments to advance social justice and human rights in democratic societies. He leveraged the UAW's resources and influence to advocate for workers' rights, civil rights, women's rights, universal health care, public education, affordable housing, environmental stewardship and nuclear nonproliferation around the world. He believed in Swedish-style social democracy and societal change through nonviolent civil disobedience. He cofounded the AFL-CIO in 1955 with George Meany. He survived two attempted assassinations, including one at home where he was struck by a 12-gauge shotgun blast fired through his kitchen window. He was the fourth and longest serving president of the UAW, serving from 1946 until his death in 1970.
The United Auto Workers (UAW), fully named International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, is an American labor union that represents workers in the United States and southern Ontario, Canada. It was founded as part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and grew rapidly from 1936 to the 1950s. The union played a major role in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party under the leadership of Walter Reuther. It was known for gaining high wages and pensions for automotive manufacturing workers, but it was unable to unionize auto plants built by foreign-based car makers in the South after the 1970s, and it went into a steady decline in membership; reasons for this included increased automation, decreased use of labor, mismanagement, movements of manufacturing, and increased globalization. After a successful strike at the Big Three in 2023, the union organized its first foreign plant (VW) in 2024.
The Port Huron Statement is a 1962 political manifesto of the American student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It was written by SDS members, and completed on June 15, 1962, at a United Auto Workers (UAW) retreat outside of Port Huron, Michigan, for the group's first national convention. Under Walter Reuther's leadership, the UAW paid for a range of expenses for the 1962 convention, including use of the UAW summer retreat in Port Huron.
William Francis Murphy was an American politician, lawyer, and jurist from Michigan. He was a Democrat who was named to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1940 after a political career that included serving as United States Attorney General, 35th Governor of Michigan, and Mayor of Detroit. He also served as the last Governor-General of the Philippines and the first High Commissioner to the Philippines.
Leonard Freel Woodcock was President of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the first US ambassador to the People's Republic of China after being the last Chief of the US Liaison Office in Beijing.
Ossian Sweet was an African-American physician in Detroit, Michigan. He is known for being charged with murder in 1925 after he and his friends used armed self-defense against a hostile white mob protesting after Sweet moved into their neighborhood. Stones were thrown at his house, breaking windows. Shots were fired, and one white man was killed and another wounded. Sweet, his wife, and nine associates at the house were all arrested and charged with murder.
Kevin Brian Bales is Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of Nottingham, co-author of the Global Slavery Index, and was a co-founder and previously president of Free the Slaves, the US sister organization of Anti-Slavery International.
The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), or Proposal 2, was a ballot initiative in the U.S. state of Michigan that passed into Michigan Constitutional law by a 58% to 42% margin on November 7, 2006, according to results officially certified by the Michigan Secretary of State. By Michigan law, the Proposal became law on December 22, 2006. MCRI was a citizen initiative aimed at banning consideration of race, color, sex, or religion in admission to colleges, jobs, and other publicly funded institutions – effectively prohibiting some affirmative action by public institutions based on those factors. The Proposal's constitutionality was challenged in federal court, but its constitutionality was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States.
The Recorder's Court, in Detroit, Michigan, was a state court of limited jurisdiction which had, for most of its history, exclusive jurisdiction over traffic and ordinance matters, and over all felony cases committed in the City of Detroit. Its jurisdiction did not extend to civil suits.
Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history, American political history, housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism, on housing and real estate, on poverty and public policy, on civil rights, and on the history of affirmative action.
Mildred McWilliams "Millie" Jeffrey was an American political and social activist during the labor reforms, women's rights, and civil rights movement.
The Philip Taft Labor History Book Award is sponsored by the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations in cooperation with the Labor and Working-Class History Association for books relating to labor history of the United States. Labor history is considered "in a broad sense to include the history of workers, their institutions, and their workplaces, as well as the broader historical trends that have shaped working-class life, including but not limited to: immigration, slavery, community, the state, race, gender, and ethnicity." The award is named after the noted labor historian Philip Taft (1902–1976).
The Ossian H. Sweet House is a privately owned house located at 2905 Garland Street in Detroit, Michigan. The house was designed by Maurice Herman Finkel, and in 1925 it was bought by its second owner, physician Ossian Sweet, an African American. Soon after he moved in, the house was the site of a confrontation when a white mob of about 1,000 gathered in protest of the Sweet family moving into the formerly all-white neighborhood. Rocks thrown by the mob broke windows, and someone in the house fired out at the mob, killing one man and wounding another. Sweet and ten other persons from the house were arrested for murder.
Sidney Fine was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. He authored books on Frank Murphy, who served successively as Mayor of Detroit, Governor of Michigan, United States Attorney General, and Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Fine was a Guggenheim Fellow and twice the winner of the University of Michigan Press Award. He received the University of Michigan's Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 1969.
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age is a 2004 book by historian Kevin Boyle, published by Henry Holt. The book chronicles racism in Detroit during the 1920s Jazz Age through the lens of Ossian Sweet, an African American doctor who moves to Detroit during the great migration. While living in Detroit he eventually moves out of the ghetto and he and his wife move into an all-white middle-class neighborhood. When racist whites attack the Sweets' home, a white man is killed. Sweet and his family are persecuted by the legal system.
Heather Ann Thompson is an American historian, author, activist, professor, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan. Thompson won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2016 Bancroft Prize, and other awards for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
Roy Louis Reuther was an American labor organizer. He was one of the leaders of the historic Flint sit-down strike that gave birth to the United Auto Workers (UAW). Along with his brothers Walter and Victor, he helped build the UAW into the most powerful industrial union in the United States. Later, as political director for the UAW, he spearheaded efforts to expand voter participation, and was deeply involved in the civil rights movement.
The Fire in the Flint is a 1924 novel by civil rights activist and writer Walter White, it was published by Knopf. The novel was written during the Harlem Renaissance and contains themes consistent with the New Negro Movement as well as promoting anti-racist themes and shedding light on racial oppression during the early 20th century. The novel tells the story of Dr. Kenneth Harper, an African American doctor and World War I veteran, who moves back to his hometown in Georgia to open a clinic and practice medicine after graduating from medical school. Dr. Harper, who is initially unwilling to be involved in racial tensions in the town, eventually fights against the Ku Klux Klan after he is subjected to hostile racism from the white residents.
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